Friday, August 21, 2009

Okawix is an open source project that allows you to download the entire content of Wikipedia, and that too in your preferred language with or without images. Okawix is available in 253 languages and apart from the main encyclopedia it also lets you download other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation - Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikinews.

As sleek and attractive the program is, a major drawback is it’s confusing interface. It’s not immediately apparent what you should do next once you open the program, and there are no help files. Here you have check the box next to the language you want to download Wikipedia or the other projects in. You can select multiple boxes at the same time.

That’s done, click on the “Select Language” link at the top (or bottom) of the page. The thing doesn’t look like a link or button at all, which is why the confusion. Anyway, clicking on it will take you to the download page where you can choose which project you want to download and where to save it.

Remember that Wikipedia is a huge project (the English Wikipedia without images alone is 7 GB and with images is a whopping 16 GB in size), and it will take several hours or days for download to complete. Once completed you can browse, read and search Wikipedia from your hard disk using Okawix’s interface.